


to the ends of the earth

by juldevere



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Family Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, only characters that have lines were tagged but our main mall crew all generally appear in this, the hoppers just love being extra about their need to save everyone okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:15:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27706126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juldevere/pseuds/juldevere
Summary: “You and me - we’re a family, Hop. Family keep each other safe. Right?”The spiralling anguish that had been planted against his chest the second he heard that scream from the parking lot, knowing perhaps intuitively that it had been her all along, suddenly feels consuming. He attempts to find any shred of composure, to swallow over the knot that is digging against his throat.“Right.” Hopper manages, meeting her eyes, feeling endlessly fond of her. “Yes, El. We’re family, we keep each other safe. That's right.”
Relationships: Eleven | Jane Hopper & Jim "Chief" Hopper
Comments: 7
Kudos: 48





	to the ends of the earth

**Author's Note:**

> Over a year and a half later and I finally got around to writing a 3x08 Hopper and El fic. But I really miss them and I really, really miss the show so here we are!
> 
>   
> Mild warning: There are mentions of blood and wounds throughout this, it's not overly graphic but it's there, so if that sorta thing doesn't sit well with you, here's your heads up.

A loud, piercing scream rings out from inside the mall.

Even from the parking lot, the sound is brutal; Joyce and Murray both visibly flinch, but Hopper instantly feels a sharp tear within his chest, as if a hook has been plunged into his body, working to disconnect his heart through muscle and skin. Because of the distance, it's hard to decipher who is screaming, how many people the sound may belong to but as if attuned to something Hopper cannot fully comprehend in that moment, every nerve ending in his body has ignited, like wires of electricity being pulled through him.

Joyce swings the car to a stop, slamming on the break and Hopper can’t move fast enough; he throws himself over the car door and barrels towards the front entrance, pushing through the double doors with such force that it’s a marvel the glass doesn’t break.

It’s not until he’s reached the banister that looked out onto the food court below, desperately scanning his eyes around, that he spots a flash of yellow and what is indisputably the top of El’s head, and doesn't stop to think. He's almost made it onto the platform of the escalators when she screams out again, the agony ripping through her voice and he feels the ground start to tilt beneath his feet, Joyce's hand at his back the only thing keeping him from falling right over as the three of them, Murray at the rear, make it down the stairs and around the corner.

Hopper stops breathing, forgetting how, as he looks over and watches El ripping open - to his abject horror - her own leg. The intensity of her strength is causing her hand to shudder under the weight of the current and a creature within seconds punctures through her skin, being forced by her will, up into the air. She emits a roar, sending it as far as it'll go across the room and it lands, immediately beginning to drag itself along the tiles until Hopper with a forceful slam of his foot, squelches it.

The kids all turn their heads at the sound, dazed expressions on their faces as they take in the appearance of Hopper, Joyce and Murray while El, heaving for air, slowly tilts up her head and relief pools in her eyes as she locks them instantly onto Hopper.

For a long couple of seconds, nobody says anything.

“Thank _god_.” Dustin finally exhales and pushes himself off the floor, scrambling back to make room.

It’s the necessary jolt of energy that propels everyone else into moving; Hopper and Joyce come forward while the others follow Dustin’s lead, either collapsing into chairs or leaning up against nearby storefronts.

From the brief assessment Hopper can make of them all, unable to take his eyes off of El for any longer than a few seconds, it’s clearly been a rough night. Jonathan, in particular, is white as a sheet, looking like he’s about to be sick and the Harrington boy’s face is a mess.

Hopper puts these concerns aside for now as El lets out a quiet moan, feebly reaching up an arm towards him. He digs into his back pocket and pulls out a handkerchief, crouching to his knees by her head. Joyce sits on the ground by El's feet, leaning over to inspect her leg before working to untie her blood-stained sneaker.

“Happy…you’re here…” El manages, her voice sounding like she'd swallowed gravel. She leans in as Hopper cups the back of her head with one palm and uses his other hand to wipe up the blood beneath her nose.

The familiar acidic burn of guilt is already coating his throat, lining his stomach, for pissing around so much time with all his erratic rage and fear, for ragging on Murray and Alexei for information and bullying Joyce for wanting to return to the kids - to El - earlier. Her chin is quivering, tears in her eyes as she looks at him and the feeling only compounds itself, thickening with regret and despair and something else, something worse that he must, for now, dismiss.

Hopper ducks down to kiss the side of her head, lingering there for a moment. “Oh, kid, you have no idea, you have no idea.” He breathes.

The corner's of her mouth lift a little, in her weakened attempt to smile and it's like a balm against everything else. He smiles in return before kissing her head again.

Finished with her nose, Hopper discards the handkerchief and moves on to check her for other injuries. Her forehead was warm, coated in sweat and there's a painful-looking bruise across her neck almost as if - and Hopper's breath catches - she'd been choked, but she makes no reaction when he traces his thumb over it. When he's satisfied that there's nothing else, no other bruises, or blood he can see, he pulls back and meets her gaze.

She looked terrible; a sallowness to her face, rings so dark they’re practically black beneath her eyes. He can tell as she slants against him, that even just sitting upright was taking an enormous effort.

“Gimme a number, El. How do you feel, one to ten?”

The last time he had to use the pain scale, at a loss for gauging how seriously she’d been injured, was months ago. She had slipped on some ice running up the porch steps of the cabin, so focused on the bag of groceries in her arms and the one she was levitating through the open front door, she forgot to look out for it.

He was busy offloading more bags onto the ground from the trunk of the blazer so he didn’t see it happen, but he heard and _felt_ the noise it made as she fell; a dreadful crash that was followed by her breathy cry of ‘ _ow_!- _ow_!- _ow_!’ His heart shooting right up into his throat as he rushed over there.

Even on a general first assessment, it looked pretty bad; her left knee was split open, blood seeping through her torn jeans, grazes on her palms and one of her ankles was turned at an odd angle. She was also crying although he couldn't tell if it was out of pain or more out of shock from the entire thing. An almost imploring expression on her face as she looked up at him, like she couldn't believe something as innocuous as ice had hurt her and that he of all people hadn’t prevented this from happening.

After some coaxing, he got her inside where he lifted her up onto the kitchen bench to better assess the extent of her injuries, but he could already tell that it was her left ankle that was really the problem, the way she wouldn’t put her weight on it and held it at a distance from the rest of her body.

It had only been a few weeks since he had given her the birth certificate; she’d held it to her chest and said the words ‘ _I'm_ _El - El Hopper’_ out loud with such conviction he had to leave the room for a few minutes to pull himself together. Even though it was supposed to signify that the risks of exposing her were no longer as high as they were before, it didn't magically remove them altogether either. He felt a churn of anxiety in his stomach at the idea of taking her to the local hospital, trying as he soothed her tears, to do his best to stifle it but it was unmoveable, like an erosion within him. There was nothing, absolutely nothing he would not do for this kid - for _his_ kid - he'd crawl to the ends of the earth if it meant she’d be healthy and safe and okay. But there moments like this one, when he was brought down by that familiar, crippling realization, that him crawling was not always enough.

After cleaning her hands and mending her knee, he tried carefully for her ankle.

El panicked, in tears again. “No! Hop - don't, don't touch it!”

Hopper backed off, and instead took the side of her face in his hand. “ _Hey, hey, it’s okay, El, you're okay - I won't touch it, alright? Dad won’t touch it, but you gotta talk to me, honey. How bad does it hurt, one to ten?_ ” He asked, ducking down to meet her eyes.

It took her a moment, still clearly rattled, but eventually she landed on a sniffled: “ _Four, I think_.”

The relief was paramount; he would keep an eye on it, but it seemed they were out of the woods of a much more dire situation. Sure enough, hours later, after some Advil, some ice and a cuddle on the couch with bear, she was happily swinging out the door to go wait on the porch for Mike.

“ _Six_ , Hop. It's a six. It's - okay.” She mumbles to him now, her eyelids drooping in their struggle to remain open.

Despite it being abundantly clear to him that it was, in fact, not _okay_ , Hopper still hesitates on how to respond to this. Her tolerance for pain was high, much higher than the average kid or even person for that matter, but the extent of trauma to her leg, the extent of the trauma he knows he cannot see, still made the number seem far too low. A possible broken ankle was one thing, ripping a toxic paranormal slug out of her own leg was another. He's been aware, for a while now, of her tendency to shrug off an injury if a greater threat was still at play, the way she prioritized her abilities above her wellbeing. It didn't take him very long to put it together, to figure out why this mode of operating was so engrained within her - like it was conditioned - and it is a near poisonous thing, the hatred he will always feel for Brenner.

It's Mike though, the only one who hadn’t moved, still sitting behind El’s other shoulder, who speaks up, seemingly also struggling with her answer.

“El, you-you hit your head before…pretty hard….and you almost passed out,” He prompts reluctantly, then lifts his eyes over to meet Hopper's. “And it’s not the first time she’s had to use up her powers tonight. Not even second.”

Mike’s voice is relatively calm and even-keeled but Hopper can easily read the anxiety on his face and respects that the attempt to hide this is most likely for El’s benefit.

El, who had turned her head just slightly at the sound of Mike's voice, doesn't say anything, now slumping awkwardly against Hopper’s shoulder and he knows this is as good of a confirmation he’s going to get. 

Hopper nods soberly in acknowledgement to Mike before looking towards Joyce who already appears to be three steps ahead of him, a resolved expression on her face.

“The bleeding has stopped, which is a good sign. We’ll bandage her leg up and go from there, okay?”

"Okay." He agrees and sits down on the floor, gently shifting El around in between his knees so she could lie back against him.

He works to compartmentalize his needling worry to instead focus on the necessary and immediate actions that needed to be taken. Scrambling together enough supplies to resemble a first aid kit was the first. Getting El up and off the floor and somewhere more comfortable was the second.

He scans his eyes around at the others, all of whom to their credit despite their own varying levels of worry and exhaustion, look attentive, as though waiting on some instruction on how to help.

“I’m gonna need someone to try and find stuff from a first aid kit,” Hopper starts, hearing the unevenness to his voice and taking a second to clear his throat, to push past it.

“We need rolls of bandages, disinfectant swabs, that sort of thing," He eyes the nearby countertops. “There might be one in a back room of a store, or even in the kitchen of one of these places but don’t wander off too far, stay within a shouting distance in case something happens.”

Mike is the first to move, jumping up to his feet. His eyes linger over El before he looks around to the others. “We’ll go, all of us, right?”

Before Hopper can fully register what’s happening, they’ve all fanned out, either sticking in pairs or going off in groups of three. Murray hesitates but gives a sympathetic nod and then also darts off.

Joyce, now supporting El’s foot in her lap, is the only one to stay and Hopper meets her eyes, a look of understanding passing between them.

“Need help carrying her?” She asks.

Hopper shakes his head, arranging a grip beneath El’s shoulders and adjusting his footing to ready himself for the additional weight. “I got her.”

It takes him a moment, silently counting to three before he lifts. “Hang onto me, kid, okay?”

Once he gets her up onto his waist, El tucks her head onto his shoulder, squeezing her arms around his neck and it’s at that moment, as she’s got her forehead nuzzled against his skin, that he’s hit by it, a debilitating surge of panic. As if picking her up this way has triggered a trauma his body intrinsically remembers but his brain ordinarily works hard to block.

For a ruthlessly vivid few seconds it floods him, it’s all he can see, the memory of Sara – of the last time he had held her.

In the beginning stages of her treatments, when they were still strange and frightening, she was especially clingy, always wanting either him or Diane to pick her up and hold her. As she got sicker, the need decreased, she no longer had the energy or wherewithal to care but some nights there were bad dreams and she would cry out, reaching instinctively for one of them.

In an attempt to remain tethered to reality, barely hanging on as they were, they took it in turns - one week on and one week off - between sleeping at the hospital or sleeping at home and on that particular night it had been him on the cot beside her bed.

He carefully scooped her up, mindful of the oxygen tubes and cradled her against him, ‘ _You’re okay honey, daddy is here,_ ’ he had hushed, slowly rocking her back and forth, ‘ _You’re safe from the monster’_ but he felt it, even then, the darkness of the chasm he was slipping into already over the insanity of this empty, futile promise.

Sara dissolves from his arms, leaving him as quickly as she had appeared until it’s El he’s now holding instead.

El who is older than Sara ever got to be. El who he loves just as immovably, just as unimaginably.

El who likes to draw quirky animals and big bright rainbows, and now giggles with abandon, like she can’t wait to let you in on the secret. Who easily schools him in their games of score four and who had just begun proudly insisting that she was going to read aloud to him at bedtime rather than the other way around. _‘I want to be ready, Hop, ready for school’_ she had told him.

The panic of what feels inevitable, losing her, losing all of this, all of what she was and what she was going to be, is there, threatening to engulf him.

“Hopper!”

Joyce beckons sharply and he’s pulled out of the reverie. His awareness starts to filter back in for what's around him, what he feels, the fluorescent lights of the mall, the weight of El's head on his shoulder and he forces the thoughts to recede. If he had any hope of getting through this night, he knows, any at all, he couldn’t think about it. Not of the past. Not of his incapability of stopping it from happening again.

What he could lose again.

Shifting El a little higher on his side, he breathes in and then out and steps forward.

“Over here.” Joyce leads, walking down the steps that led to the open rest area that offered places to sit including a fountain and a large plant structure.

Hopper carries El over to the structure, getting her onto the bench before sitting down, gently tugging her back against his chest.

"I’ll go grab some water and some towels so we can fix your leg up a little before we wrap it, you two going to be alright?” Joyce asks, wiggling a finger between them.

They both look up at her, bleary-eyed and tired, but it's their likeliness that Joyce sees more than anything else. She wonders, faintly, if sometimes it was easy for them to forget, the way she does as she looks at them, that it had not always been this way, the two of them together.

She smiles, watching as El buried her head against Hopper's arm; _yes,_ _probably,_ she thinks. "Okay. I’ll be right back." With a final glance, she turns and quickly walks off.

It soon grows quiet, the sounds of the others racing from store to store only a murmur in the background.

El closes her eyes against the steadiness of Hop’s breathing, feeling his hand occasionally combing through her hair. The familiarity of both these things, the normalcy, dulls the pain that is pulsating throughout her body and she leans into the pull of fatigue.

It's short-lived, only a matter of seconds going by until Hopper is gently shaking her shoulder. “El, don’t fall asleep yet, okay? We have to be careful with your head," He gives her shoulder another squeeze. "But hey, you see the cool skylight? You think we should knock out the roof at home and put one in?”

Forcing her eyes open, El tilts her head upwards to the ceiling, following the blue reflection the fountain was making across the square windowpanes until she spots, out of her periphery, the large gash on the side of Hopper’s forehead.

“Is it - painful? How much does it hurt - one to ten?”

Hopper, bemused, looks down and follows her eye line to the cut in question, letting go of her to brush his fingers along it. It’s a little jarring that it’s even still there, that fairground brawl already a distant memory, barely a blip on his radar in the scheme of things.

At his silence, worry has filled El’s entire face, and he quickly smiles reassuringly at her, bringing his hand back to her shoulder. “It’s okay, kid. Probably about a one.”

“Did you get it in…Ilnoy?” El asks, slurring over the word, still eyeing his forehead suspiciously.

“Illinois, El - it’s where the city of Chicago is, remember?” Hopper corrects before pointedly looking at her. “And I thought we talked about that, huh? The void stuff? It could've been bad when you found me."

She maintains eye contact with him, but she bites, just slightly, her bottom lip - a tell of her's he's just started to pick up on - and he realizes from this that finding him in Chicago hadn’t been the only looking she’d been doing.

He knows he shouldn't be all that surprised that she's broken a rule - stubborn as she was and still, in a way, testing boundaries - but especially that it's the one about using the void. When the gate had been closed the first time, and everything had settled down enough to allow for a new type of normal, her ground rules were amended. Some of them, like being out in a crowded, public space, being home by curfew, eating her vegetables were non-negotiable but others, such as her chores and the use of her powers, were up for discussion, points he could throw out there but that she had the final call on determining. The chores were relatively easy for them to sort out, she more or less was already doing a chunk of them before they'd put a label to what they were. The matter of her powers, however, was a little trickier for him to navigate, aware that it was a delicate line he had to walk when it came to enforcing parameters around them. He had thrown out limiting the use of the void first, a power he figured she no longer had much incentive to use.

_“What do you think about holding off on looking for people that way, kid? It’s just, it’s people’s privacy, you understand what I’m saying? The way your bedroom is for your privacy and dad's is for his. And – I worry about it hurting you, El, if you see something you weren't expecting. Can you only use it if there’s no other choice, and you know there’s danger?”_

She had nodded seriously, one of the only suggestions he’d made that she didn't bristle against or even question. It’s not so much disappointment he feels upon learning that she's decided to continue to use it any way but rather worry, a sign of the diminished belief she has of her own wellbeing.

El is seemingly unfazed by this worry and stares at him evenly. “There was danger. I had to find you. No other way to check for safety but me.”

Hopper sighs, breathing out slowly through his nose; she was technically right but it didn’t exactly make him feel better about it. He tips his head down, briefly bumping her forehead with his own before leaning back, holding her eyes for a moment.

“You're right, El. It was dangerous and I should’ve been here and I’m sorry. But I’m your dad, it’s my job to keep you safe. It shouldn’t have to be yours.”

El looks offput by the sentiment, her eyebrows pinching together. She starts to open her mouth as if to argue when they’re interrupted by Joyce, who has returned armed with a bottle of water, a stack of napkins and a bucket. She’s offloading it all onto the bench, assembling a makeshift triage station when Max, Steve and Robin come flying in, almost colliding into one another as they skid to a stop.

All three of them extend out their hands: an assortment of swabs in Robin and Max’s and a tube of what appears to be an antiseptic salve in Steve’s.

“Will this work? It’s not much but it should - it should help with the pain and stop El’s leg from getting infected, right? Just, keep it from spreading?” He sputters out, looking wild-eyed from Hopper to Joyce and back again. Up close, he looks much worse, most of the area surrounding his right eye puffy and swollen and almost three entirely different shades of red. Hopper feels so stunned by the juxtaposition of it all that his own words come out a little breathless.

“Ah yeah – yeah, kid, that’s great. That’ll help, thank you.”

Relief blooms across Steve’s face and he hands the items over to Joyce then turns to Max and Robin, waving up his hand to his forehead in an earnest attempt to give them a salute. Both of them – it’s practically simultaneous – roll their eyes.

"Come on, skipper, that’s enough, we did good.” Robin says and tugs at the back of his uniform shirt, dragging him over to sit on the seats of the fountain.

Max throws an apprehensive look towards El but gradually follows them over, sitting on the other side of Steve after he pats the spot next to him.

By the time everyone else has returned with their own finds, Joyce has finished flushing the wound with the water and napkins, getting rid of the glass residue and dried blood. She goes over the array of supplies they now have: four rolls of gauze, a dozen bandages, a box of Advil and more antiseptic wipes.

Murray is the one who had found the Advil, tossing it over before yelling out about ‘Alexei’s diagrams!’ and disappearing back up the escalators.

With nothing left to prepare, Joyce crouches down on her knees by El's feet, working at maintaining her composure for the task ahead. To ignore how glaringly obvious it was that they were under-resourced when it came to acute injury repair; El's leg needed stitches, not a couple of gauze patches and bandages wrapped around it.

She turns her head, levelling her eyes with El who looks only marginally less pale than she had on the floor.

“I’m going to take it slow but you tell me if it’s too much at any time and I'll stop, okay sweetie?” Joyce says gently then glances up to Hopper. “And you squeeze Hop’s hand if you need to, he can take it.” She assures, a glint in her eye and the corners of Hopper’s mouth lift up in a hint of a smile.

El is already moving her arm back to find Hopper’s hand and he catches it, adjusting his other arm to fold around her.

“Okay. I'm ready.” She says quietly, once they’re locked in together, and nods for Joyce to start.

Nobody speaks the entire time, a nervous energy clinging to the spaces between them all that offers little room for talking. El herself is tense against Hopper’s arm, her eyes squeezed shut. Without thinking too much about it, his breathing slows, becomes more systematic and he watches as she takes on the rhythm of it, out for four and then in for four and begin to relax against him. He squeezes her hand and she squeezes right back, a silent commitment; _together, we're going to get through this together._

Almost five exceptionally long minutes later, and Joyce is finished.

“Okay, done!” She announces and after a relatively long period of near-dead silence, the sudden noise makes several people, including Lucas who yelps so loudly it echoes, jump.

El, unfazed, slowly opens her eyes, peeking down to find a neat, thick white bandage wrapped around her calf.

“Thank you.” She rasps gratefully and Joyce smiles as she sits down on the bench, gently taking El’s foot in her lap and tugging her sock and shoe back on.

“Now you tell me, do you feel dizzy at all, like you might be sick or does your head hurt?”

El nods. “Just my head. Here." She points to the side of her forehead and Hopper brushes back her hair to find that there's a faint bruise beginning to emerge against her skin. He quickly looks over at Joyce, suddenly remembering what Mike had said before, about how hard she'd hit her head when she fell but Joyce, rather than matching his distress, dulls it.

"It's okay, Hop. We'll keep her awake and give her some of those meds. I should go grab her a drink." She looks over in the direction of the fast-food shopfronts, but Jonathan, who had been sitting on the floor, in-between Nancy and Will, bounces to his feet. “I’ll go, I'll go find her some water.”

Hopper pulls his eyes away from Joyce to look over to where he’s already running off to. “Ice too, kid! If you can find some!”

It doesn’t take long for Jonathan to return, both ice and drink in hand and Hopper wraps the ice in the handkerchief Dustin had supplied – announcing upon handing it over, that it belonged to his _Susie-poo_ , much to Hopper’s utmost bewilderment – and holds it up against El’s forehead.

Now that the immediate crisis has been managed, there’s a noticeable reduction of tension in the air. Murray is still absent, busy with the diagrams, so they all take advantage of the time they've got waiting on him to rest, a couple of the kids even lying right along the floor, others going off to grab their own cups of water or to find the bathroom in pairs.

Joyce gathers the remaining first-aid kit supplies and brings them over to assess Steve who fails at his attempts to politely brush her off, Robin and Max like two stronghold wedges on either side of him.

Hopper watches on only half paying attention; Murray or not, they'd have to start sharing information soon, to formulate a game plan and he’s conscious of how much time has passed already. But for all the seconds that go by, he can’t bring himself to speak up, acutely aware that this was going to be the last opportunity for many of them – for El – to truly rest before they had to move again.

He squeezes his arm across El and pulls her in against him a little closer; he knows it’s coming, their separation. The panic he feels at the idea of leaving her is a restless, festering thing he has been trying to ignore.

Perhaps this, he faintly thinks, is really why he is stalling.

“We keep each other safe.” El abruptly announces at that moment, curling a hand around his wrist, as if either sensing his anxiety or feeling it herself.

Hopper blinks down at her, caught off guard and she takes in his face, finding something there that only compels her further.

“You and me - we’re a _family_ , Hop. Family keep each other safe. Right?”

The spiralling anguish that had been planted against his chest the second he heard that scream from the parking lot, knowing perhaps intuitively that it had been her all along, suddenly feels consuming. He attempts to find any shred of composure, to swallow over the knot that is digging against his throat.

“Right.” Hopper manages, meeting her eyes, feeling endlessly fond of her. “Yes, El. We’re family, we keep each other safe. That's right.”

El nods and returns to her water, seemingly at peace with now having made this understanding clear.

Hopper can only look down at her, thinking that whatever might come next, their god-willing short separation as he worked to close the gate, that he would try to use this truth to lean himself against. Not lingering over the fear of losing her but the reckoning that they had found each other.

**Author's Note:**

> Massive RIP to this optimistic hope of a ‘short’ separation. Sorry Hop. :(
> 
> Also, I admit that the plausibility of Hopper including a ‘listen kid, really try and only use the void for emergency purposes’ rule is a little flimsy but I’m using El’s “against the rules?” question that she poses to Max in 3x02 and Mike’s “that’s against the rules!” objection in 3x04 as my low-key rationale. You could easily come up with reasons for why in both instances it isn’t inferring that there is a specific rule about the void but I chose to lean towards the literal interpretation in this instance. If it doesn’t work for you, I completely understand. 
> 
> Come find me over at tumblr as @ribbonthief


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